Posts Tagged ‘Piano’

To the Netherlands, and I suspect to the only book of this project that I will have read before. Years ago I was the moderator of a message board (technically I still am, but it’s so quiet these days that it moderates itself), and one of our regular contributors was a translator who frequently deplored British readers’ lack of interest in translated literature. In the spirit of appeasement we decided to do a group read of a book from an unfamiliar language, and he suggested The Garden Where the Brass Band Played (De koperen tuin), a 1950 novel by the Dutch writer Simon Vestdijk, translated by A. (Alex) Brotherton. I felt like paying it another visit.

It’s a coming-of-age novel (a genre I inevitably gravitate towards) set in the early part of the last century, telling the story of Nol, the son of a judge in the northern town of W …, and his relationship with a girl four years his senior, Trix, the daughter of local musician Henri Cuperus.

Near the start of the book we witness 8-year-old Nol at a public garden where Cuperus conducts a Sousa march that fills Nol with such joy that he is moved to dance with Trix, also present. This moment of delight – of falling in love, as it turns out – colours everything that follows it. The Dutch title of the book would be more accurately rendered in English as ‘The Brass Garden’ (to be pedantic, ‘The Copper Garden’), the brass (or copper) referring not merely to the musical instruments but to the sheen that Nol’s memory of that afternoon assumes. It’s not a spoiler to write that the book ends with Nol returning to the garden and finding it damp and desecrated, not golden like the garden of his memories: that’s what has to happen when you grow up.

If the book ends with tragedy, it opens with exuberance, even in the trials of Nol’s childhood. Nol has heard his older brother Chris, frustrated by his piano lessons, crying in the room next door, and has even shed sympathetic tears himself, despite the coolness of their relationship. He nonetheless takes a vindictive pleasure in the prospect of getting one over on his brother:

Both of us came to supper with red-rimmed eyes, looking dazed, like geese after a storm. It had already been decided that Chris didn’t have to go to piano lessons any more. After the soup he had just as much to say as ever, but during the dessert, when my father told him to keep quiet, he didn’t kick me, which was just as well for him because, despite the sympathy that gave me a glow of pleasure for days afterwards, I had my answer ready. I wasn’t going to say: ‘He kicked me, the beast’, as I had done once and been sent to the kitchen by my father. I’d just make a sign, a movement of my hand, tracing the course of a tear down my own cheek with a finger.

Incidentally, though a minor character, Chris is at the centre of a comic interlude early on that I can’t believe I’d forgotten, in which he sets up a small business at school selling peppermints that gets out of hand. It’s so funny that I can’t resist quoting it.

He had rings under his eyes from sitting up, night after night, first at his homework, then, till after midnight, studying ‘economics’, compiling peppermint statistics, pricing shares with stock exchange quotations and all the fiendish complications of dealing in shares. He got thin and haggard, he looked as if he was bent under a heavy load. Even my parents, who knew nothing of his nightly labours, began to show the strain because he talked of nothing else at the table and persecuted my father with unanswerable questions. He always had a supply of peppermints of diverse shapes with him. Sometimes he would offer these to us after dessert. It was all treated as a joke though my parents used to look at each other with raised eyebrows and never kept the peppermint long in their mouths.

Tremendous.

To return to music, the reasons for Chris’s abandonment of the piano are Clementi and Dussek, two names that strike terror into the hearts of little boys even now, presumably. Nol is not deterred by the failure of his brother, and persuades his parents to let him take piano lessons from Cuperus, who proves an inspiring teacher. Though the story of Nol’s love of Trix is the main focus, his love of music runs throughout the novel, always underscoring his hero worship of Cuperus, his estrangement from Trix, his contemplations of the past.

Most prominent of all the music in the book is Bizet’s Carmen, a performance of which Cuperus conducts when Nol is at the impressionable age of 17, with Trix singing the minor role of Frasquita. The second intermezzo (which I take to be the Entr’acte between Acts 2 and 3), with its gorgeous duet between harp and flute, later joined by clarinet and strings, recurs at strategic points. (There is also a clear parallel to be drawn between the characters of Carmen and Trix, though it’s not gratuitous.) The sweet wistfulness of this music infects the book.

Nol’s growing up is depicted partly through his changing taste in music. Snob that I am, when I read of Nol’s being moved by Sousa, my first reaction was, Sousa? Only now I think of it, I myself had a brief Sousa phase when I was about nine.

Frasier: Remember when you used to think the 1812 Overture was a great piece of classical music?Niles: Was I ever that young?

Before he is too much older, Nol thinks back on Sousa as ‘the music that I had long since grown out of.’ He is introduced by Cuperus to the likes of Bizet and Wagner, and eventually branches out on his own, falling in love with the music of Debussy and Ravel that even the progressive Cuperus does not care for. Vestdijk writes about music with sensitivity and understanding. I remember flinching, the first time I read it, at Nol’s dismissal of Op. 31 No. 1 as Beethoven’s dullest piano sonata, the finale notwithstanding; I listened to the music this time and found myself nodding sadly with sympathy.

The growth to maturity of Nol is so delicately drawn that you are barely conscious of it as it is happening. A small event can change his understanding of life subtly, such as the conversation where he asks his mother, ‘But surely … you must have been in love once?’ and receives the poignant reply, ‘Not really.’ At various points he repeats his mantra, ‘Time is irrelevant to love’, which seems to me frankly bullshit, and perhaps by the end of the book he realises as much. Whatever else romantic love is, it is not stationary: it kindles, surges, mutates, dies (or am I making the mistake of assuming everyone experiences love in the same way I do, which I confess is probably not the case); and the depiction of love in this book, though reserved, convinces and moves me deeply.

This smile wasn’t like the sunlight breaking through the clouds. It was something altogether different, it must have been the lines around the eyes that lit up again with their natural mischievousness, the eyelids, and those lashes … I don’t know how to describe it exactly. I don’t know either how soon I forgot her again during those summer holidays, or how long, how many months, years even, I let pass by and scarcely gave her a thought. I don’t know how that was ever possible.

Four weeks ago, as a refuge from despondency, I decided to learn some new piano music. I love the late Brahms piano pieces, but don’t play many of them. They always sound so forbidding, but although the music is complex the notes aren’t, always, and so I made a longlist of about ten that I thought were surmountable, starting with Op. 118 No. 2. This is how it’s sounding at the moment.

Simon at Stuck in a Book writes that ‘maintaining the good things in life in the face of evil is as much a defence as most of us can manage’ – more or less my attitude in turning to Brahms. On a possibly related note, I’ve been pleased recently to note that I’ve not lost my ability to fall in love with new things. So many of my favourite books, films, pieces of music are things I’ve known since childhood or adolescence, but within the past week I’ve started to explore for the first time the piano music of Billy Mayerl, which contains many jewels, and just last year I watched for the first time Carlos Saura’s spellbinding 1976 film Cría cuervos, which has already become important to me. In that film, Geraldine Chaplin plays for her daughter Ana Torrent this Mompou piece, which I learnt last weekend. (Only now does it occur to me that one of my childhood memories of my own mother, rather neatly, is of her playing the Brahms intermezzo, Op. 117 No. 2.)

Here’s me playing Grainger’s piano arrangement of The Sussex Mummers’ Christmas Carol yesterday. Grainger notes at the head of his score:

The tune was noted by Miss Lucy E. Broadwood at Lyne, near Horsham (Sussex), in 1880 and 1881 from the singing of Christmas Mummers called “Tipteers” or “Tipteerers” during their play of “St. George, the Turk, and the seven champions of Christendom.”

‘Sir, I don’t always understand poetry,’ pleads Timms in The History Boys, which I like to quote here ad nauseam. Well, there’s not understanding and there’s not understanding. If I don’t understand Ezra Pound, that may simply indicate that I’m a normal human being; if I don’t understand the poem above, an unpublished verse by Louise de Vilmorin (1902-1969), it’s partly because, vaguely competent though my French is, I will never have the comprehension of a native speaker, and so I fail to observe whatever idioms and intralineal meanings it may contain; in English I understand it even less. The last verse, in my rough translation:

Queen of the seagulls, my orphan girl,
You were pink given to my hands
Pink beneath the muslin
And I remember it.

Just because I don’t understand it doesn’t mean I don’t love it, as I love ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ or Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge. The Beethoven defies analysis, up to a point (not that I’ve ever tried); this poem, slight, for all I know written in a stray quarter of an hour, probably doesn’t. But as I read it, thinking perhaps, What does this mean, I also think, How beautiful this is. I see the seagulls and the pink and the muslin and the mists.

When, ten or twelve years ago, I was in a voracious poetry-reading phase, I frequently read French poetry I didn’t comprehend, just for the feeling of the words. Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Mallarmé. The magic wouldn’t have worked with a language I didn’t speak at all – Hungarian, for example – but with French I knew at least how it sounded, if not always what it meant.

When, foolishly, I went to see Calixto Bieito’s production of Carmen at ENO a few years ago, the banality of hearing it sung in English killed the opera stone dead. The mystery was shattered, Bizet’s clothes were well and truly off. For all I know the libretto is dreary in French too. Stephen Fry, writing years ago in the Literary Review:

Call me old-fashioned, purblind, hidebound, reactionary and out of touch if you will, but I believe that one of the great advantages of being born English is that one can hear the world’s greatest opera in a language other than that in which one asks strangers the way to the lavatory and orders deliveries of coal. However literate or musical the translation, opera in English always sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan. Most libretti are horribly commonplace and I feel very sorry for Italians and Germans who listen to Da Ponte and Wagner and cannot hear the pretty rhythms and alliterations of their two beautiful languages for the banal meaning they convey.

I’ve had assorted phrases from ‘Reine des mouettes’ swimming around my head for a week or so, and that’s because Francis Poulenc’s setting of the poem has insinuated itself into my brain. To quote Jeremy Lion, ‘It is a medically proven fact that if you set things to music you remember them much better, like the alphabet – and wars.’ Here is an educational song teaching facts about various countries of the world.

Poulenc was the closest thing to Haydn the last century could come up with. Four-square phrases, catchy tunes, humour, plus extra insouciance. He mingles joie de vivre and poignancy with speed and grace. I love Sylvia McNair’s performance here, accompanied by Roger Vignoles. Her vowels are a bit off, but together they have the measure of a song that is very difficult to perform.

Poulenc doesn’t hang about, does he? One semiquaver and you’re in. Hear the rhythmic variety of his melodic setting too, the first two lines syncopated, the third and fourth in regular quavers. The poem doesn’t have a regular metre (how does poetic metre work in French anyway? I get confused), but even if it did you sense he’d shake it up a bit to reflect speech rhythms. When the words recur towards the end of the song he introduces further rhythmic variation through triplet figuration.

The setting of the final stanza is especially delicious, the urgent, questing harmonies of the piano and the ‘quasi parlando’ vocal pressing for some kind of resolution, then the blissful release of the final two lines, prolonging the ecstasy of the eventual cadence. But the music doesn’t resolve with that last vocal phrase, ‘Et je m’en souviens’, but is carried by the piano to the subdominant, major and minor sevenths alternating gloriously before the longed-for release. Hard to describe Poulenc without using the imagery of orgasm. He’s just that kind of composer.

Any amount of analysis doesn’t explain why I feel the way I do about the music. You can break it down into chords and patterns, but exactly why this note here or that note there should make me shiver is a mystery, not least because I may be the only person it affects in this way. What has given me the context to ascribe this particular emotion to this particular part of this particular song is all the music I have ever listened to. I’ve devised an inexpressible grammar of music in my mind. I don’t know how to approach that, or whether it matters.